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Do Zombies Eat Ivy? The Undead Reach Academia

There is a zombie survival guide and a zombie etiquette guide, a best-selling version of “Pride and Prejudice” with zombies (soon to be a major motion picture), a collection of “Zombie Haiku,” at least two zombie-themed television series and, in time for the holidays, a book of zombie Christmas carols.

Academics have also begun to feast on this latest popular culture craze: Princeton University Press has published “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us,” which lists privatized Social Security, efficient financial markets and trickle-down economics as examples. In February the press is scheduled to release “Theories of International Politics and Zombies.”

Now three Australian professors have sent out a request on the scholarly listserv H-Ideas for contributions to a book on how zombie culture resembles the culture of higher education itself.

“We propose to canvas a range of critical accounts of the contemporary university as an atavistic culture of the undead,” said the professors, Andrew Whelan, Chris Moore and Ruth Walker. By their measure the undead include “a listless population of academics, managers, administrators and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum.”

To get a better idea of what zombie academics mean, take a look at the cartoon video “So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities?” on the professors’ Zombies in the Academy Web site.

There a deceptively sweet-looking undead undergraduate mechanically announces to her English professor that “I am going to be a college professor” because “I have brilliant thoughts about the theme of death in literature.”

Don’t you know that fewer than half of all Ph.D. students get full-time jobs, while the rest are adjuncts who make less than the university’s janitors and secretaries, have no health insurance and spend years working to publish articles in obscure scholarly journals that no one cares about, her professor asks.

“I like Robin Williams in ‘Dead Poets Society’ — I want to live a life of the mind,” the student replies.